The Ferrari Pitstop Challenge is one of those happening events on my campus this time of the year. Teams of five compete to re-fuel a real Ferrari Formula One car, and replace one of its tyres. The quickest team wins.

The contestants are not those pros in top form that you typically see on race tracks, but rather my normal office going colleagues like Alice and Dilbert. Now, you’d think they’re no match for the pros. I thought so too. That was until last Friday when the winning team clocked—hold your breath—3.40seconds!

The pitstop challenge is about focus, coordination, and teamwork. What better way to share and propogate that idea in the work we do everyday?

But 3.40seconds?! Incredible!

Image courtesy: American Petroleum Institute.

If you’re a geo-scientist, seismologist, geologist, or a structural engineer, then you’ll see what I am seeing.

By launching OpenSocial API, Google—the 800-pound gorilla—debunked the ‘yes, yes, no, no’ syndrome—on social networks—with a resounding ‘yes.’ They are trend followers, not trend setters, so I can’t blame them. I certainly don’t blame them for putting their mouth where the money is.

I may be among the very tiny minority, but I do think that social networks are:

• For dumbtards¹ who are inept at having their own private communities, or incapable of building their own websites and having a community around them, or both.
• For media and web companies monetizing by using those dumbtards as guinea pigs, and getting them to click on everything dished out, advertisements in particular.
• For market researchers who are trying to hard sell concepts and benefits of a user community to their clients, while the dumbtards stay blissfully unaware of their behaviors tracked—without consent.

Let me back up a bit. The longest social network I have ever been on was Linked In. It came close to being part of a community I care about. But after a few years on it, I realized the lack of benefits I thought it would bring—new contacts, new opportunities, contributions (useful or otherwise) by those new or old in your circle of friends, contacts.

My assessment is that unless you live in a complete community isolation, you can do well in your own networking—friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, school friends, neighbors and acquaintances—not to mention the entire internet.

I may be old school, but I believe that best functioning communities are those on mailing lists. No shitty scrapbooks, no request for contacts or recommendations, no virtual request for pass-the-baton stuff. And they get work done too. I’d like to know how many active communities—who really get work done—are on Facebook, or Orkut, or on any other social network?

As far as I know, everyone of those GTD communities are on their own mail lists. They dish out solutions before you can compose your next email. Have you seen it happening in these so called web 2.0 social networks?² I haven’t seen one, but I am open to being enlightened.

Direct networking is more like picking a phone up³, introduce yourself, and be your best. Works just as it always has. In a social network(ing site), you’re leaving a debris of blunders, disasters—unintentionally without realizing it will come back to haunt you—as scraps, comments, and the occasional farting—all open to the entire population, not to mention nosy marketing types digging around your community trying either to get something, or trying to influence the group in some way. And how many people really think about this is a good question in itself.

Have you ever asked yourself before joining why you want to join Orkut, how does it benefit you personally? If you’re out to just have fun, date, pose as someone else there, and are sticking around farting casually, then this post isn’t applicable to your good self. Go back to sleep. But if you’re awake, you’ll do well by asking yourself some serious questions; because these networks mean more to their providers, much less to you as a person.⁴

These may be extreme views, but they’re mine. And yes, this is a rant.⁵

1. From Fake Steve’s cliched vocabulary.
2. And please, I don’t want to hear the argument that mail lists are social networks. They’ve existed long before some bright spark came up with that term.
3. You can do that with email too.
4. See what I mean?
5. The door, by the way, never closed for those wanting to walk out.

Before you begin with a startled look—”oh such a thing is possible at all?”, do yourself a favor, take the ego trip by signing-up for Google Alerts and sign-up for keywords and your web address (if you have one) on Technorati. These pigeons bring home the wheat and the chaff.

The social networking phenomenon is still very new, and people are posting things online without thinking about the future consequences to their careers. Information, pictures, forum comments, jokes, and outdated CVs are now in the public domain and available for anyone.

We all have a personal brand the same way that a company has a brand for its products and services. We invest in developing our brand “education, training, work experience” and we develop our brand equity, that is to say our network of trusted personal contacts, so why don’t we look after this the same way a company does?

Emphasis mine.

They call it the Daylight Saving Time (DST). The first time, I became aware of this was in 2002 when the server, which hosted my site, started acting “funny” with my post publish times.

For someone experiencing this “phenomenon” for the first time², I fail to see the obvious advantage this brings. It reads more like a hassle to me. Changing clocks doesn’t really seem to mean anything, other than, perhaps, “convenience”.

May be that we’ll get used to this in time, but right now, this apparent “convenience” seems to be rubbing us the wrong way. I mean waking up at 0500 instead of the usual 0600³, is surely going to take a toll on our body clocks.

Oh, what the hell.

1. Yes, Sun is brightly shining in this part of the world.
2. I come from a place that doesn’t observe DST.
3. Even if that 0500 actually now reads 0600 on the clocks.

As one of the bank employees said to me, with a wry smile: “In England, they have it in English. Here, it is in Dutch.” This, when I asked him why the options in the ATM menu were all in Dutch and that I couldn’t make a head or tail of it². It goes without saying, I tried each button, so I now know what each one does.

1. Withdraw cash.
2. Account balance / information.
3. Deposit cash.

It is a similar story in a shopping mall. I fail to distinguish between a service counter and a cash counter. The person on the other side tells me: “Do you want to buy this? Yes? Then please go to that counter.”

This phenomenon, I noticed, is not restricted to the real world alone. Most Dutch websites do not have an English version³. To them, English is just any other European language. They do not seem to acknowledge that it might be considered as a universal language in communication⁴, thanks to the internet.

Not to be left alone at that, the “intelligent” web sites think I am Dutch, simply because I am accessing the site from within the Netherlands. And they serve all content in Dutch. I eventually end-up using either commands like these, or a translator plugin.

After the web sites, it is now the turn of the hardware. Take those debit-card⁵ swipe machines located near the Check-out counters and they’re in Dutch⁶. I just note the word PIN, followed by a confirmation to the amount billed with a “Ja” (spell J as Y), and I am done.

My work machine keyboard acts funny, even though I have English language turned on as default. For a double quote to appear, I have to first press the key followed by a space bar, or else it won’t appear. There’s also something in my work machine that is softwired to Dutch, and I often notice things that are non-English. And so it goes on.

Some bare necessities (For everything else, there’s a dictionary and a plugin):

• Zoek — Search
• Voor Huur — For Hire (For Rent)
• Te Koop — Buy
• Kip — Chicken
• Kinderen — Children
• Makelaar — Broker (Real estate agent)
• Contant geld — Cash

1. We use fingers. Thanks goodness, for the numbers do not exceed them, or else we would be carrying a notepad!
2. I have pressed a button meant for depositing cash, when I really wanted to withdraw, a few times more than I should have :).
3. Not all sites are so gloriously designed to suffix a command to the web address and get it in the language you want.
4. Probably because their native language suits them well, even if they exhibit excellent English language skills.
5. I am told that they hardly use cheque books here in Holland. Everything is paid either online or using credit / debit cards.
6. Hell, no, I am not complaining, I am more like, if it isn’t in English, I might as well learn some Dutch.

In a process in time, an event of a Markov process depends on the previous one and not those earlier in the process i.e., knowledge of the present makes the future independent of the past.

I am not sure I’ve got the credits right, but, this quote makes me go hmmm.., and then, wow!